The doll’s hair was human. The smell of it burning is horrible. Slothrop hears movement from the other side of the fire. A ratcheting noise—he grabs his blanket, ready to vault away out the empty window frame, expecting a grenade. Instead one of these little brightly painted German toys, an orangutan on wheels comes ki-ki-ki-ing into the firelight, spastic, head lolling, face in an idiot’s grin, steel knuckles scraping the floor. It rolls nearly into the fire before the clockwork runs down, the wagging head coming to dead center to stare at Slothrop.

He feeds the fire another tuft of golden hair. “Evening.”

Laughter, somewhere. A child. But old laughter.

“Come on out, I’m harmless.”

The ape is followed by a tiny black crow with a red beak, also on wheels, hopping, cawing, flapping metal wings.

“Why are you burning my doll’s hair?”

“Well, it’s not her own hair, you know.”

“Father said it belonged to a Russian Jewess.”

“Why don’t you come in to the fire?”

“Hurts my eyes.” Winding again. Nothing moves. But a music box begins to play. The tune is minor and precise. “Dance with me.”

“I can’t see you.”

“Here.” Out of the fire’s pale, a tiny frost-flower. He reaches and just manages to find her hand, to grasp her little waist. They begin their stately dance. He can’t even tell if he’s leading.

He never saw her face. She felt like voile and organdy.

“Nice dress.”

“I wore it for my first communion.” The fire died presently, leaving starlight and a faint glow over some town to the east, through windows whose panes were all gone. The music box still played, beyond the running time, it seemed, of an ordinary spring. Their feet moved over clouded, crumbled old glass, torn silks, bones of dead rabbits and kittens. The geometrical path took them among ballooning, ripped arrases, smelling of dust and an older bestiary than the one by the fire… unicorns, chimaeras… and what had he seen festooning the child-sized entranceway? Garlic bulbs? Wait—weren’t they to keep away vampires? A faint garlic smell reached him exactly then, an inbreaking of Balkan blood on the air of his north, as he turned back to her to ask if she really was Katje, the lovely little Queen of Transylvania. But the music had run down. She had vaporized from his arms.

Well here he is skidded out onto the Zone like a planchette on a Ouija board, and what shows up inside the empty circle in his brain might string together into a message, might not, he’ll just have to see. But he can feel a sensitive’s fingers, resting lightly but sure on his days, and he thinks of them as Katje’s.

He’s still Ian Scuffling, war (peace?) correspondent, though back in British uniform these days, with plenty of time on these trains to hash over in his mind the information Mario Schweitar bootlegged for him back there in Zürich. There is a fat file on Imipolex G, and it seems to point to Nordhausen. The engineer on the customer end of the Imipolex contract was one Franz Pökler. He came to Nordhausen in early ’44, as the rocket was going into mass production. He was billeted in the Mittelwerke, an underground factory complex run largely by the SS. No word on where he went when the plant was evacuated in February and March. But Ian Scuffling, ace reporter, will be sure to find a clue down in the Mittelwerke.